Not that anyone would ever ‘choose’ to be a victim of an attack but many of us go through life thinking that …something like that would never happen to me!

Now I know that’s foolish thinking. That point became abundantly clear to me when I attended the REAL LIFE Self Defense event with Tactical Training Specialist and Former Bodyguard Mike Gillette.

Unfortunately, bad stuff happens to good people all the time. There are bad guys all around us looking to do ‘bad guy things’ as Mike would say. My eyes were opened to how quickly life can change for innocent people just going about their day.

Stuff like walking to your car at night after a long work day, stopping at the ATM for some quick cash or walking your dog…and then BOOM, you’re struck or grabbed from behind and things get bad really fast.

It’s actually pretty scary to think about these things. But there are bad people in the world who won’t think twice about ending your life to get what they want.

Mike has seen it all before in his 25+ years as a training specialist and former bodyguard. He’s familiar with what attackers think and what they’re willing to do and none of it is good.

It was crystal clear to me during the workshop that I was listening to an authority on the topic of self-defense. Mike knows more about handling yourself in dangerous situations than anyone I’ve ever listened to on the topic.

The problem with most self-defense programs is that they’re complicated, filled with techniques that require lots of time and practice to master. What I know for sure is that complicated doesn’t work when you have seconds to save your life or the lives of those you love. You need to act fast!

What I discovered inside the first hour of the event were the most effective moves to defend and fight off an attacker. It felt really good to easily apply these skills instantly with barely any practice.

The key is to be mentally and physically prepared but honestly, I don’t think most of us are.

Even though I consider myself to be a stronger than average man who’s pretty tough, I realized I need to have a plan should I find myself in a dangerous situation one day.

I was blown away by the simplicity of the tools Mike shared with us. As he said over and over again, this has nothing to do with looks. Protecting yourself from an attack isn’t about looking cool like a Hollywood movie, it’s about effectiveness and inflicting pain quickly.

One of my favorite takeaways was when Mike said, “Pain is a language all attackers understand.”

Now I have a few “go to” tools in my toolbox should I ever be confronted with someone looking to hurt me or my loved ones. I’m a husband and father of two young kids and I would do anything to protect them from harm.

Like I said, I never want to be a victim, of course no one ever does. But yet, every day an innocent man, woman or child is savagely attacked and left for dead for their wallet, jewelry or just because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This amazing event taught me how to move, how to act, things to look for in my surroundings and all of the options I have at my disposal if I’m standing face to face with someone looking to harm me.

I was so excited afterwards to talk to my wife and show her some of the things I learned from Mike. I want her to know these moves inside and out just like me so that she can defend herself in a bad situation.

It’s not about how big and strong you are, it’s about being all in and feeling prepared in a very scary moment. Like Mike said, even if you leave here with just ONE thing that you feel comfortable with doing, it could save your life and give you that magic moment to escape.

This event was life changing. I saw women taking down men far bigger than them with ease just by applying a simple technique that they learned in minutes. I now have a feeling of confidence that I never had before or even knew that I needed in the first place.

As I said, being strong is nice but if you freeze up in a life-threatening situation because you’re not prepared, what good is it?

It’s called REAL LIFE because everything you need to learn is already inside of you. You’ve done all of these moves before without even knowing it. Mike just uncovers these tools for you in minutes so that you can effectively defend yourself and fight back should that day arrive.

I know there is considerable confusion with many young lifters and athletes about their diet. Lots of diverse information to sift through in separating nutrition from nonsense.

“Should I eat this or that, someone told me never to eat this and to only eat that every other Tuesday…”

Geez, let me make it really easy for you. Below are the TOP 10 energy rich foods that will stand the test of time in my opinion as a certified strength coach and sports nutritionist.

Here is a very quick grocery store aisle-by-aisle tour of what the majority of amateur and professional athletes consider as the 10 super foods that are the most nutrient dense for their “keys to health” nutritional wants and needs.

1. Eggs:

Egg whites are made up of pure protein that’s considered nearly perfect because of its sublime blend of amino acids. Egg whites are very high in protein. The white of one egg contains 4 grams of pure protein. This is the cheapest and best protein you could ever consume. If you’re trying to cut out fat, you can skip or reduce the yolks you eat but remember they are rich in vitamins and minerals as well.

Remember that you must cook eggs at 140 degrees or more for at least three minutes in order to kill any salmonella that is on or in the egg. If you go “ROCKY” style and drink them raw, there is some risk.

2. Sweet Potato:

Most people assume that because of its sweet taste that it’s higher in calories than a regular potato.This is not true because there is an enzyme in the potato that converts starches into sugars. This adds to the deliciously sweet taste.

3 ½ ounces of sweet potato contains less than 1 gram of fat, 2 grams of protein and 24 grams of carbohydrates, with an adequate amount of dietary fiber. They are also rich in vitamin A, vitamin C and vitamin B6. Also, traces of copper and magnesium are present.

Bake them, nuke them, grill them or sauté them. Yummy!

3. Tuna:

The best tuna is the brand that’s packed in water. Tuna packed in oil doubles the calories of tuna and multiplies the fat by ten times.

Tuna is very convenient and is very high in protein. It contains 30 grams of protein per 3 ½ ounce serving with less than 1 gram of fat. It also contains 100% of the RDA for B12,and the same healthy amounts of niacin, phosphorus, vitamin B6, magnesium and potassium.

There are three types of tuna commonly found both fresh and canned; Albacore, Bluefin and Yellowfin.

4. Turkey Breast:

Turkey breast is the leanest of any meat (without the skin of course). It contains 1 gram of fat per 3 ½ ounce serving, and 30 grams of protein for the same portion. It contains high amounts of vitamin B12 and B6, copper, iron, niacin, phosphorus, riboflavin, and zinc.

Turkey can be roasted, broiled or sautéed. You can also buy ground turkey from the grocery store. Look for the ground turkey breast which has the lowest fat content. You can use ground turkey for tacos, hamburgers, meat loaf, over pasta etc.

5. Pasta:

Pasta is virtually fat free if eaten by itself. But that isn’t realistic for most humans, we need some sauce!

3 ½ ounces of pasta contains less than 1 gram of fat and about 2 grams of protein. Pasta is rich in vitamin B6, magnesium and copper. Try to stick with reasonable portions and of course today there are many varieties available. Find the ones you prefer and stock up.

6. Oatmeal:

Oatmeal is a tremendous source of complex carbohydrate. It has more protein than wheat and twice as much as brown rice and is also very low in fat. The total amount of fat is less than 2 grams per serving, hardly enough to worry about.

Oatmeal is full of iron and manganese, lots of vitamin E, copper, folacin and zinc.

It is a great source of dietary fiber and it helps control your cholesterol. Oatmeal is a great pre-workout meal and source of carbohydrate if eaten at least 1 hour before training and it’s also very inexpensive. Try to stick with the low sugar varieties and add in fruits like bananas and berries for flavor and added awesomeness.

7. Bananas:

Bananas are one of America’s most popular fruit. They taste great, easy to eat and they are available year-round. Bananas contain 23 grams of carbohydrates per 3 ½ ounces.

They have a low amount of protein and less than 1 gram of fat and bananas contain healthy amounts of potassium, vitamin B6, vitamin C, folacin and magnesium.

Broccoli is arguably one of the best cruciferous vegetables in the world and its close relative cauliflower is right there with it. Mix the two together as a side dish for any dinner. These magic veggies are best consumed raw or lightly steamed.

9. Carrots:

Carrots are very high in sugar, almost as much as beets but natures sugar beats the snot out of artificial sugars found in processed foods.

They are known to be good for the eyesight (especially night vision) since they’re very high in vitamin A which is responsible for proper functioning of the retina. Carrots contain very little fat and a modest amount of protein but they’re very rich in carbohydrates, vitamin C and potassium.

Always wash carrots really good if you enjoy eating them raw because they can carry a lot of places for bacteria buildup. This is true of most vegetables you would consider eating raw, give them a good washing first!

10. Beans:

Beans are a great source of protein. They are almost 25% protein and contain almost no fat. They are very high in vitamin B6 and B12, potassium, zinc, calcium, iron and magnesium. They are a great source of carbohydrates since they digest very slowly. Beans provide you with a steady stream of energy throughout the day.

As welcomed as these 10 super foods may seem please keep in mind that anyone or a combination of them may in certain instances offend or cause hypersensitive reactions (food allergies).

Fortunately for me, none of the above listed 10 super foods have any ill effect on me what-so-ever yet I can’t speak for everyone reading this article.

Therefore, it may be a good idea to keep a food and symptom diary, write down everything you eat and any provoking systems you experience (diarrhea, fatigue, gas, joint soreness, sinus irritations, and water retentions etc.). This information could be super valuable to you over time and help you on your path towards improved strength and health!

CW: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This is Coach Chris Wilson from CriticalBench.com and I am delighted and I’m not joking, I am delighted to have with me on the line today, and Ryan, please if you will, I want to get your last name right. Is it Fanely [phonetic]?

RF: Very close. It’s Faehnle, so like Stanley, but with an F.

CW: Faehnle.

RF: Yeah.

CW: Okay, so Fan-ley [phonetic]. Got you. Okay.

RF: Yep. It’s German so there’s a lot of funny letters in there.

CW: Oh, okay, all right. Well, hey, it’s cool and it’s unique and I’ve never seen that name before, ever. So that right away distinguishes you from everyone.

This is Ryan Faehnle on the line with me today. He’s a certified strength and conditioning specialist, but that just scratches the surface. He has trained athletes in different sports at all levels, high school to professional, for over 20 years. He’s worked with NFL Superbowl champions as well as just the ordinary Joe Average and Susie Q. He’s worked with them all, so the spectrum. And he’s traveled the globe, he’s lectured to trainers and to coaches about strength and conditioning and body composition, just a bit of everything. But I want him to go a little bit deeper. So first of all, welcome, Ryan, to the call. I’m very happy to be talking with you today.

RF: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to dive in. People that know me know that I am extremely passionate about all things strength, conditioning, health, fitness, nutrition, supplementation, so I’m ready to get into it.

CW: Yeah, I mean, you read your bio and it—his bio is like… I mean, I just said like a few sentences. His bio is like two pages. I’m like, jeez, it makes me sound as if I’ve never stepped foot in a gym and worked with somebody in my life when I read your bio.

And anyone with that kind of background experience, obviously, can be intimidating, of course. Because you make it sound as if the fitness and health world just comes easy to you, that it’s natural. It’s a perfect fit. But has that always been the case for you?

RF: Oh, man, it’s funny you ask that, because that’s not even remotely close to being the case. I grew up with a very loving mother who showed her love and demonstrated her love with junk food. So every day I had access to McDonalds, I could drink as much pop as I wanted. Now, to be fair, we also had, you know, she also made a lot of vegetables and she did make some healthy dishes. But I really was not restricted at all. And so I grew up kind of a chubby kid and I don’t want to say kind of. I was a fat kid, plain and simple. No PC about it. And I got picked on, I got teased. I was bad at sports and eventually I decided I wanted to do something about it. So I began exercising.

Now, my exercise originally came from trying to improve my sport performance for basketball. That was the love of my life, was basketball. I really wanted to be good at it. I had dreams of playing in the NBA and while that didn’t work out, it started me down my career path of being a strength coach and now consultant. And so, but no, the health and fitness does not come naturally. Even as a strength coach I still battled weight issues, especially when I was in my big earlier prime of being strong. I listened to all the power lifters, who cares what your body fat is as long as you have a massive bench press. And so I was still super fat.

And so then it got to a point where I’d had enough. I was 292 pounds, 2-9-2, not lean at all and I kind of looked like I didn’t belong in the industry of the gym. Even though I was strong, I felt like I didn’t belong. So that started me getting onto kind of crazy dieting, like really hardcore. I was tough; I was in the military. So I felt mentally I could do a lot of tough things. So I started doing some hard dieting. Well, eventually that led to like some binge eating issues and if I’m honest with you, I mean, this is something I still battle to this day. It’s like once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic type thing. Even if you haven’t had a drink in 30 years, it’s the same thing for me. I control it and I manage it very well, but man, if something goes wrong and I slip, I could be three boxes deep in cereal looking for answers at the bottom of a cereal bowl.

So, yeah, it has not always come easy to me. So I have to work tail off for everything I’ve ever done. But that is one thing that I can tell you no one does more than me, and that’s work hard to continue my craft, to learn. I read every day. I educate myself. I practice it with my clients and myself. So it’s definitely not been natural, but it’s my love so I’m going to continue to do it.

CW: Yeah. Wow. That’s where I think most experts come out of. They come out of real experience, obviously. And that’s where that passion comes from, too. If you’re educated about something and passionate about something, because you’ve lived it, experienced it, I mean, that just drives obviously your success and your ability to reach people.

RF: No doubt.

CW: No one wants to work with somebody who’s going to help them if they’ve never struggled with something, maybe, themselves.

What is it, then, about hunger in particular that completely sucks every bit of willpower from us? Obviously it’s probably the number one driving force why most people fail at any kind of diet. It’s just the hunger that overwhelms. It just takes control. But why is that?

RF: Well, first of all, I want to give you a little background so kind of you can understand the hunger connection. So what I started noticing, both in myself and in clients, clients would have rapid fat loss. So they would have a goal, they would do a diet to achieve a goal and then after the goal, once they achieve whatever they set out to achieve, maybe it was a better beach body or a certain percentage body fat, it was almost like the fat just piled on faster than it came off.

And what I noticed, I started taking notes, and it occurred in all fast fat loss diets. So whether it was ketogenic diet, a high carb diet, a cyclical diet, an Adkins diet, a Zones diet, whatever it was, it happened in all of them and the common thread or the common theme that I found with it was post goal hunger. So after they achieved their goal they literally would eat their results away. They could not stop eating. They were always starving and I knew there had to be a connection.

So I started kind of researching it and what I came upon, which any scientist or physiologist is going know, is the two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, which are basically your hunger and appetite hormones. They’re peptide hormones. They’re secreted at different parts in the body, leptin primarily by fat cells and ghrelin primarily by your stomach. Letptin actually decreases your appetite. So leptin is the hormone that lets you know that you’re full and ghrelin actually increases your appetite.

So leptin is contained in body fat. So if you have a high amount of body fat you’ve got a lot of leptin. You have a lot of the chemical that tells you to stop eating. But here’s the problem, here’s the kicker. Over time, with poor eating habits, poor lifestyle habits, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, you can become resistant to leptin. So basically what happens, your body begins to ignore the signal that you’ve had enough to eat.

Ghrelin is secreted when your stomach is empty and what it does, it gets highest just before a meal to cue you to eat and then it decreases sharply after you eat. Here’s the other kicker though. It’s secreted also in stressful situations. So that’s why we stress eat, right? We binge on candy bars and we binge on potato chips when we’re really stressed because that hormone is secreted during stressful times.

Now, these hormones, everyone’s like, ah man, this sucks, ghrelin, I’m always hungry. Leptin, blah, blah, blah. They are both end survival mechanisms. You don’t want to completely get rid of their function because they’re built to keep us alive. Your body wants to stay exactly as you are because it doesn’t know if you’re just trying to lose five pounds or if you’re starving on a desert island. So these things are regulatory hormones to keep you alive and healthy.

So here is the thing. Weight loss that is too rapid, happens to fast, causes a massive surge in ghrelin levels. So it makes you super hungry. Well, super hungry, suppressing that requires willpower and as you mentioned, willpower, I mean, it’s something we have to overcome. Willpower is kind of like a battery, right? It only lasts for so long and then when the battery runs out you’re in a situation where your body—ghrelin is high, so your body is telling you to eat everything in sight. You’ve lost your willpower and now you’re eating and the weight comes piling back on.

This is a scenario I see all too often. Somebody has high body fat levels, bad eating habits, they don’t exercise. So their body is constantly telling them that they’re hungry and any possible signal that they have to indicate that they’re full is being ignored by the brain. This is a huge hurdle to get over. So a lot of people will start exercising. What is the first kind of exercise everybody wants to do when it’s time to lose body fat, Chris?

CW: They want to start doing some cardio.

RF: Cardio, aerobic exercise. You want to know what the bitch of that is? Aerobic exercise increases ghrelin, so it makes you even more hungry. So now you have this person whose brain is ignoring the fact that they’re full, their stomach is secreting chemicals to the brain that’s telling them that they’re starving and now they’re doing exercise that makes them even more hungry. This is just a whirlwind. Okay?

So now they start doing all kinds of cardio, because they feel like they have to, they go on a super low calorie crash diet and maybe they succeed in losing a bunch of weight really quickly, okay? A lot of people do. Because, again, they can go as long as their willpower lasts. Now, ghrelin levels are through the roof because of how they did it and once the willpower breaks they’re just going to gain crazy amounts of fat, usually, most often, and I’m saying this from personal experience, too, usually becoming fatter than they were before they started. And the vicious cycle repeats with fad diet after fad diet and year after year. People who are genuinely trying to change their bodies are ending up fatter and sicker and just unhappy, depressed. So it’s a bad cycle.

CW: And it’s an awful cycle because as you mentioned, that depression most often leads to more poor choices in food and none of us binge eat—why can’t we just binge eat cauliflower?

RF: Exaclty.

CW: It’s just not satiating enough. It’s not satisfying. When we binge we crave high fat or sugary things.

RF: Yep.

CW: And you’re right, I mean, we’ve all—when you were talking earlier in the call about when you were younger and went through that phase of just being kind of the heavy kid. I had that for a couple of years and man, it’s just such a—some of us never escape it.

RF: Right.

CW: Some of us just can never get out of that funk of poor food choices and having just everything is at our fingertips anymore. You walk in the grocery store and you’re bombarded with all the bad stuff right when you walk in and unfortunately most of us succumb to that.

RF: Right, and that’s the hard part. A lot of the foods that we’re eating, Chris, are foods that do not signal us that we’ve had enough to eat. And I’ll talk about this in a little bit, but ghrelin is secreted by the lining of the stomach in response to how much food is in the stomach. So if you eat something like vegetables, let’s say, which are really full in terms of volume. Let’s say you take six cups of spinach. That takes-up a lot of space in your stomach, but it’s not a lot of calories. Well, ghrelin will stop its secretion early because your stomach gets full.

If you eat something like chocolate chips, for example, they’re very, very tiny so they don’t take-up a lot of space, but they’re high in calories. So there’s no signal that you’ve had enough to eat. So that’s one of the hardest problems. And you know, to be fair, the other thing—and we can talk about this too—is yes, there are foods that are more nutritious for us and offer greater benefits. But one of the most dangerous things that you can do is to start looking at food as good food versus bad food, because once you get that mentality in your head you will feel guilty every time you enjoy something that you like. It’s not about never having a food again. It’s about finding a way to incorporate it into your plan that still allows you to see success and be sustainable.

We’re not talking about bodybuilding contest preparation here. That’s a completely different animal. We’re talking about helping a healthy, “regular” person get in better shape and to do that you do not need to completely eliminate your favorite foods.

CW: Wow. Yeah, and it’s that label that we put on everything, right? The good and the bad and that immediately leads to obviously the way we think about things. And we usually get happy or proud of ourselves when we eat healthy foods and we get like mad at ourselves, angry at ourselves, not during, but after we’ve made a bad choice, especially if we’re really trying to—if we have a goal set for ourselves.

RF: I had a client one time and we started her off on a really—a pretty strict nutrition plan. She had a lot of body fat to lose. And she was checking in with me and just results kind of weren’t happening and so I asked her, said, hey, what’s up? I was like, you know, in your opinion why do you think the plan isn’t working? She goes, Ryan, all I can think about are jelly beans. She goes, I love jelly beans. They’re my favorite thing and since we started our nutrition plan I haven’t had any, so they’re on my mind all the time. So I’m going to make it two days and then I’ll cave and eat a whole bag of jelly beans.

I said, okay. Let’s do this. I said how about this, on your hardest leg training days you can have a cup of jelly beans right after your workout and then on your hardest upper body training days you can have a half a cup of jelly beans right after your workout. And from that moment on it was like the fat melted off of her because now there was no restriction in her diet. She could have her favorite food every single day that she trained. There wasn’t this desperate feeling of, oh, my gosh. I’m never going to have jelly beans again. We put it at a place in her day where it was going to be most beneficial to her in terms of replenishing the fuel that she just used during her workout so it’s not going to get converted to body fat, it’s not going to stop her progress in the least and man, it was amazing to watch her change. And she’s made the comment to me, she said it’s so liberating to know that I don’t have to feel guilty about this. So it’s like you have to keep in mind the psychology of the client and the person as well.

I tell you, Chris, whatever you do in the next 30 seconds, do not think of a pink elephant. What is the first freaking thing you thought of? A pink elephant.

CW: No doubt.

RF: So if I tell you no cookies, no ice cream, no this, ever, that’s all that’s going to be on your mind, even if you wouldn’t have had it in the first place. But since I told you you can’t have it, dang it, now you’re going to bury your face in an entire half-gallon of ice cream.

CW: We all have that deep desire to rebel against when someone tells us don’t, never, you can’t, stop.

RF: Right.

CW: You know, like when you’re a kid. You cannot ever go in my room or in that room or in that office or whatever. What’s the kid do the first change they get they sneak in to investigate. And the same thing goes with the food. So I mean, I had a great question for you and you already handled it. You already tackled it.

RF: Oh, sorry.

CW: No, no, but it’s good. I mean, you got to it before I could even ask it. It’s just about bad habits and we all have them, whether it’s food based, whether it’s exercise based, but we don’t—we can’t ever really… With your jelly bean example, we can’t stop bad habits because it will eat at us. It will just eat at us. Most people cannot cold turkey anything.

RF: Right.

CW: But if they have a lifeline to that, if they have their little cup or half cup post workout and they’re able to at least still enjoy a moderate, a small amount, of what they crave, what they think about every day, then they feel like, okay, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I can continue with this. And the big picture is how consistent are you? How long are you willing to commit to something? Three weeks or three years?

RF: Well, it’s interesting. I see people all the time and I’ve had people make the comment to me. Coach, they say, I find this really strange. Ever since you’ve allowed me to eat whatever it is, jelly beans or pizza or chips or whatever it is, I’m actually like losing. I’m getting in shape at a faster level than I was before. And if you think about what’s actually going on here, what most people will do is they’ll crash diet hard for five days of the week, Monday through Friday, or Monday through Friday afternoon, then Friday night, Saturday and Sunday they go completely off the wagon and actually binge eat.

I’ve actually done the math on a lot of people and a lot of people will eat so much—so they’re in this huge calorie deficit Monday through Friday, and then Friday night, Saturday and Sunday they eat so much that not only do they completely undo the deficit, they actually create a surplus over the course of the week. So it doesn’t matter day to day what happens, what matters is what state is your body in week to week, month to month, year to year.

And so what ends up happening when we remove those binge eating patterns and we just trickle their favorite foods in in a reasonable manner, they actually end up finally achieving a calorie deficit for the first time in their lives. And so it’s kind of an interesting thing. It’s very confusing to them. They’re like, so I’m eating this stuff now, but I’m losing weight faster. It’s like, well, yeah, it’s because you’re not eating it like an asshole like you did before when you were eating an entire pizza and ice cream and beer. It’s like all at once and until you’re sick.

CW: It’s the perfect example of all or nothing. We don’t operate well with either one of those.

RF: Right.

CW: It’s like we must find a happy medium, a compromise, a way to moderate our intake of whatever it is. And if people are like, okay, so I can eat a salad, I can have a small cup of jelly beans, but then I can still have like a slice of pizza every now and again, too. Oh, all right. So this is how it—you know, you just can’t eat a whole pizza. But you can have a slice or two.

RF: I had a client, he was actually preparing for a photo shoot, so this was like—and again, I’ve mentioned before, photo shoot and bodybuilding contest prep is a different animal in its entirety. But the guy was prepping for a photo shoot and he had a family vacation like literally three weeks out and for any of you that know what happens in a bodybuilding show, those last really eight to 12 weeks. You’re eating like a monk. You know every gram of every single macro nutrient that you’re eating every day and so he was freaking out because he had a family vacation.

I was like, all right, look. You’re going to take your meal plan and you’re going to take, let’s say, meal four, at what’s supposed to be 300 calories and it was supposed to be chicken and brown rice and broccoli, let’s say. When you’re on vacation eat whatever your family is eating, but just try to approximate 300 calories of that. So in essence, you go to a pizza joint, 300 calories is about one slice of pizza. So he did it, we still made sure he hit his protein targets and whatnot, but he was eating pizza, he was eating burgers and whatnot. He comes back and he didn’t lose a single step in his contest prep and he was like, it’s so liberating to know that you can still achieve these results just by moderating your intake, again.

CW: That is something. And that’s obviously an extreme, like you said, extreme example because prepping for a photo shoot or a show is such a different level and people aren’t trying to get to 5%, 6% body fat. They’re just trying to look good and feel good. But still.

RF: Exactly.

CW: The message is still clear. Shifting gears a little bit, we all know that obviously diet, as we’ve been talking about, is critical to getting results, to fat loss, to looking better, feeling better. But exercise obviously is a huge component as well. It just needs to be part of it. The time required as well as a life that’s filled any more in this modern technology-based world with sitting, as I’m sitting talking to you right now and I sit on a computer for a living. So it’s hard to undo all that sitting, even if I go out and I work out hard an hour a day.

RF: No doubt.

CW: Share with us some of your unique experience and background in therapy, physical therapy, to activate and wake-up the muscles faster.

RF: Okay. So first of all you have to understand I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life. That’s rule number one. I am a risk taker. The fastest way to get me to do something is to say, I bet you can’t… And then I’ll do that.

I did some stupid stuff many years ago. I ended up with a completely ruptured pec major. It literally rolled up, completely rolled up on my sternum. That was a lot of fun. So I had to have surgery. Basically the surgeon had to—he drilled a trough inside the head of the humerus, or the arm bone, shoulder bone, and literally put his hands in there, weaved the cords of the tendon, pulled the tendon out the backside, tied a knot and then the bone eventually grew back over it. But it was—I have a huge scar. It’s shrunk a little bit, but it was like an eight inch scar up the front of my arm.

So I had this pec injury, surgery, went through rehab and for a period of about six months I couldn’t pick my arm up, like I couldn’t lift it up. And it had nothing to do with like the pec itself, but it was the muscles of the shoulder. I literally just couldn’t pick it up. They did some diagnostic testing and found that I had an inhibited serratus anterior muscle, which you might not know unless you are in physical therapy. But it’s an important stabilizer of the shoulder and if it’s not working you can’t lift your arm up.

So once they found that I started doing physical therapy exercises specifically for that muscle and what’s amazing is it resolved itself really quickly, but I started to learn. I was like, man, I’ve never felt this muscle contract this hard in my life. And I started to think, you know what? What if we applied these drills in a more bodybuilding context, so in a more muscle building context rather than therapy.

If you look on your body and pick out what your best body part is. You think it’s the most well developed. I’m going to bet you that you can contract it very easily, without much effort. You can make it cramp and you can really feel the contraction. Would you say that’s accurate for you, Chris?

CW: Oh, of course. Absolutely.

RF: Okay. Now take the body part that you have that you feel is the least developed or the most underdeveloped, that you struggle to build. It’s a little harder to contract, right? Like, you can’t really feel it sqeeze. Would you say that’s accurate, too, for you?

CW: Yeah. The connection that you have to it, it’s like the awareness isn’t there.

RF: Right. And so what that is, that is your brain that is not—has the inability to send the signal to that muscle. So you can keep pounding away. Take bench press, for example. A lot of people will bench press to develop their pecs, but if your brain has trouble activating your pecs, your triceps and shoulders are just going to take over and you can bench press all you want, the pecs will not be optimally stimulated and they won’t be optimally developed.

So we all have stubborn body parts that we struggle to develop, so this is related to muscular innervation, or the ability of the brain to send a signal through the nerves into the muscle. Well, in physical therapy they use these activation exercises to improve when people are injured. I’ve started using them for people, like you’ve said, who have been sitting all day. They have poor posture or maybe there’s just a muscle that’s really not developed well. And we’ve started incorporating those.

It’s a simple concept in theory, but you really have to know your anatomy to get it right. it’s pretty simple. You basically take the muscle to its most shortened position and do an isometric contraction with very, very, very light or no weight whatsoever and do 10 repetitions with a 10 second hold, isometric hold, on each repetition.

Now, where a lot of people screw this up is they try to go hard on it and they try to really like turn it into a workout and they end up turning on all synergists and stabilizing muscles surrounding the muscle that they’re trying to work. It should start off as a very gentle contraction until you learn to turn the target muscle on and only the target muscle and then you can further work on squeezing it harder.

These can be done daily. They can be done multiple times daily, which I will tend to do for people. If I have a bodybuilder and the judges have told him, man, your pecs are lagging. I will have them do pec activation exercises two to three times daily and then again before his pec workout in order to improve that.
So basically that wakes-up the brain, it improves the innervation or the nerve bundle into the muscle and it makes them contract. So now that you’ve turned the muscle on it’s like a light switch. You turn the muscle on, then you go to do your hard workout and now the muscle is working as it is supposed to. So in the bench press example, you activate your pecs beforehand then you go do your bench press and now you’re creating a stimulus to build a bigger chest.

So that’s kind of where I started with this activation stuff, and it’s really proven to be very effective for people not only returning from injury but also just in developing certain body parts. It’s pretty cool.

CW: That’s awesome. I can’t help but think as you’re talking about that, you know, we’re using a bodybuilder as an example. This could be for anybody. Just think, the posing element. Where you’re obviously trying to show your body to a panel of judges and to an audience and you’re trying to show them, look at my body and look at my muscles. Look what they can do. And so the connection that they have and all the effort and time spent in these positions and posing and contracting the muscles, they have probably—they’re at the top of the heap when it comes to that mind/muscle connection, right?

RF: No doubt.

CW: Just because no one has spent that amount of hours in front of a mirror just tweaking and positioning themselves in these ways. But their muscles are all alive. They have an intimate understanding of how to fire everything.

RF: Yep.

CW: And if regular people had some of that, you know, you could imagine. Not that people want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger any day soon, but if they had his ability to pose in front of a mirror, they would make these muscles wake up.

RF: Yeah, and there’s other implications, too, especially for the population today. A lot of it is pain. Back pain is one of the most debilitating—I’d say “injuries” because often times there’s no actual isolatable injury. A lot of times it’s just, oh, man, my back started killing me. Well, a lot of times it’s inactive glutes, it’s inactive transverse abdominis muscle in the abdomen, inactive internal obliques that stabilize the spine. I’ve had people—I had a guy who was a firefighter, ironically, recently—he wasn’t a client of mine, just a friend. And I saw him like hobbling into the gym one day like looking awful. And he told me, he said, it’s the first time he had gotten up in the past week. He had been completely down. Now this guy has five kids, five children. So he didn’t have, I mean, he was laid-up in bed, wife taking care of all the kids and couldn’t work and he said I did something to my back, tweaked my back.

I said, okay. Come over here. I gave him a couple breathing drills, some abdominal activation work and he like stood up and he’s like, oh, man. This is good. I told him to do it a couple times a day and here like yesterday—so this was probably a week ago. And then yesterday he was in the gym doing front squats, throwing a medicine ball violently against the wall, jumps, all kinds of stuff. So a lot of times it’s really that simple. It’s just turning stuff on like a light switch.

CW: He hit something. And it’s because a lot of us, without even realizing it, we’ve just elected—even for people that work out. We go for a run or we go to the gym a few, three times, a week. But then we spend so much of our time in his half fetal position, this seated position, and we’re just—our body’s just turned off. We’re not standing, we’re not up on our feet moving around. Like people not that long ago, if you go back 100 years or more, people just weren’t sitting so darn much.

RF: Right.

CW: And it’s this culture that’s obviously kind of a global thing where just we’ve all kind of been conditioned to be in this seated position and it’s really, really hurt our physical health, obviously. So it’s great to get that kind of insight and I thank you for sharing some of that and obviously with that pec injury, you have a really good understanding of how all that works.

RF: Yeah. It was hilarious. I mean, it was kind of funny at the time, because my co-workers, I was a strength coach at the time, university. They would mess with me. They would put something up on a shelf and be like, hey, Ryan. Can you get that? I’m like, shut up. I couldn’t even lift my arm. But I got that sorted right away.

One other thing I want to talk about real quick, Chris, with proper activation, and this is controversial. I’m going to go ahead and admit it. It’s controversial and the impact is going to be small, but for some people a small impact is all that’s necessary to start to get results.

A lot of times our “stubborn body parts” aren’t just weak, they may be just covered with body fat. We all have fat deposits at different areas. We all have a “last place” that body fat wants to come off of. When you contract a muscle it gives off heat. This heat causes fat deposits from around that muscle to be released into the blood stream. This is called lypolysis.

Now, if you have trouble activating a certain muscle it is possible that you are going to have fat storage in that area, okay? So one of the things that I do with stubborn body parts where people are carrying excess body fat is I will have them do activation drills, then a workout for that body part and then I have some specific cardio protocols that I’ll have them to after. So the activation and the weight training helps release the fat from the area, then the cardio work helps to burn the fat from that area, if that makes sense.

And again, it’s a minor—you’re not going to go from looking like an elephant to a Victoria’s Secret model overnight. But I have seen it make some measurable changes in skin folds when doing this protocol.

CW: It obviously makes sense to me and you can’t help but think about the whole spot reducing theory, you know, when people—if I just do more crunches, more sit-ups, I’ll have this great six-pack over time.

RF: Right.

CW: It’s like, well, no.

RF: Not quite.

CW: Sit-ups kind of stink anyway for your abs, but that’s a whole other conversation. We could get into that.

RF: We could open that can of worms, too, yeah.

CW: We could open that one wide open, yeah. But I understand, obviously, the theory behind it. If you’re dealing with more back fat or something, say as a man, but you aren’t spending maybe a good amount of time doing pull-ups and doing some of the exercises that would have the greatest impact on some of the biggest muscles in your back, but then all of a sudden you say, hey. I’m going to commit to X amount of pull-ups per week over 30, 60, 90 days and I have a hard time believing that you wouldn’t notice a shift in how your body looks, how it’s developed, how it feels firmer in that area, because you’ve dedicated a certain amount of time to that. And then like you said, you mentioned the science behind it, lypolysis. All of a sudden it’s like, okay, in essence it almost does work it’s just maybe there’s so much more that goes into it, too.

RF: Oh, no doubt. It’s not a magic bullet thing. It’s not going to create miracles, but I definitely do, with the protocols, I have some supplement protocols that assist with the lypolysis and then the cardio portion is kind of important, too. And we talked a little bit, in brief, about how a steady-state aerobic exercise increases ghrelin levels. I’m not completely anti-cardio, but it’s just not the first thing that should be done.

So what a lot of people do when they lift weights, so the fat is released from that area, but then if they don’t burn it, it just gets deposited elsewhere on the body or right back where it came from. So that is why I do utilize the post-workout energy systems development work for the fat loss in that area.
CW: Yeah. I’ve never—I can’t say I’ve never—but most often I just don’t see someone with an ideal physique who only does cardiovascular training.

RF: I agree.

CW: You know, only does running, only does biking. There needs to be another side of it. There needs to be another component.

RF: Yeah, well, if you think about—weights are truly king when it comes to a better body. So if we talk about—a lot of people that have excess body fat will say, I just have a slow metabolism. My metabolism is sluggish. Your basal metabolic rate or BMR determines 60% to 75% of your daily calorie burn. That’s how much calories you burn just sitting on your butt. That doesn’t account for exercise.

CW: That’s your organs functioning and everything else.

RF: Right. That’s just keeping you alive. Exercise is a very small percentage, believe it or not, of your daily calorie burn. So what increases BMR? Weight training boosts BMR. When you increase your BMR you literally burn fat when you’re sleeping. You hear a lot of get-rich-quick schemes talking about earn money even when you’re sleeping. Well, when you boost your BMR you burn fat even when you’re sleeping. So that’s why weight training should be the top priority.

I look at it as a hierarchy. If you only have, let’s say, 45 minutes a week to train, I would do three 15-minute weight training sessions. If you have a little more time than that, I would probably add-in some high intensity interval type cardio. And then still, if you have more time after that, then you start adding in more steady-state aerobic type cardio. And that’s kind of the order I start introducing these things for people because you have to go with the biggest bang for your buck, which when it comes to changing your body composition, is weight training.

CW: Yeah. And obviously understanding that and knowing that in the way you teach and go about working with people, can you share—you’ve already shared a couple really cool stories with some of the people that you’ve worked with. Can you share a few of the other transformations that you’ve witness, maybe just recently, with some people that you’re working with?

RF: Yeah, man, I’ve had quite a few interesting ones. One of them a while back was a—he was actually a triple medalist at the Beijing Olympics. He was a swimmer and I knew his coach and his coach contacted me for some help with some off season training. And we worked him out and gave him a program and he actually shredded-up pretty nicely, so an already elite Olympic athlete, triple medalist, again, in the Olympics. So that was pretty fascinating.
I had another guy, a football player, he was a funny one. He weighed 350 pounds, so that’s a lot.

CW: He was a football player. He was a defensive tackle or an offensive lineman, right?

RF: Yes. He was a D-lineman, but the coaches needed him closer to 315. And because he was really explosive, but he could only do about two plays before he had to get a substitution. So they needed to improve his work capacity. So with him I didn’t change any of his foods. Like, I didn’t take away any foods that he ate and enjoyed, I just moderated the amounts and worked a little bit on when to include them.

For example, he loves his Country Time Lemonade, which as you know is full of sugar. It’s basically just sugar water. And so he would wake up in the morning—and in his mind, he had—his background was not in health and education. So he just assumed lemonade equals lemons, lemons is a fruit, this is good for me. So he would get up in the morning and smash several of those Country Time Lemonade cans even when he was doing nothing. Like, before practice or before training. So he’d be sitting and then drinking 140 grams of sugar. And so we just basically modulated a little bit and said, all right, keep your lemonade but we’re going to have it around workout time or around practice time instead of just while you’re sitting around. So that was one change we made.

So start with two cups of cruciferous veggies and a protein shake. He would have 50 grams of whey isolate protein, two cups of veggies and then eat his pizza. Well, what ended up happening was he got full sooner so he didn’t eat as much pizza. So that was my way of getting him to eat less without making him—without telling him he couldn’t eat what he wanted. Does that make sense?

CW: Right. And still providing all the nutrition that he required.

RF: Yeah, exactly.

CW: Being an athlete and having to be physical, yeah.

RF: Exactly. So a lot of people do the opposite. They eat their high calorie foods first that don’t take up a lot of space in their stomach and then they remain hungry even though they’ve overeaten on calories. So that’s one of the kind of—I hate the term “life hack”, because there’s a lot of stuff out there that is kind of cheesy, but it’s a great hack for getting in shape, is starting every meal with two cups of veggies and if it’s going to be a particularly junk food-esque meal, two cups of veggies and a protein shake. And that goes a long way in helping you to eat less.

The other side of that is you have to listen to when your body’s had enough. Once you have your veggies and your protein shake and you’re eating whatever other food you are, you need to kind of stop when you’re about 80% satisfied. So don’t eat to the point where you’re like, oh, I’m so bloated. Don’t eat to the point of being full, eat to the point of being satisfied, if that makes sense.

CW: Right, because a little bit of hunger won’t kill you.

RF: Right.

CW: If you’re 80% of the way there, you’re like, okay. If I just have one more big glass of water, like, I’m find. And ten minutes later you’re not even thinking about food.

RF: If there’s one like put it all into one sentence for the best chance of success at fat loss, I would say it would be learn to embrace a tolerable level of hunger. So not so hungry where you’re like starving and going to eat everything in sight. Mildly hungry. If you can get used to that feeling—it’s not an emergency. How many of us panic when we get a little bit hungry? And it’s ridiculous because we live in the western society where we have access to food whenever we need it. And so it’s like, we get a little bit hungry and we’re like, oh, my gosh. I’m starving, because we’re dramatic like that, too. We’re dramatic, too, right? I’m starving. And it’s like, you’re not starving. You ate two hours ago.

So learning just a mild level of hunger, starting the meal, eating and then finishing the meal while you still have a mild level of hunger, that’s one of the best things. If you can embrace that concept, you don’t need to get too nitpicky about your food selections. You can really kind of eat what you want. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s not an empty promise. If you learn to modulate your appetite you can do it.

CW: And life goes on and we’re both about the same age, you know, married with kids. You realize something. The wisdom starts to be part of your life, you know, because when you’re 20 you just think you know it all and you really don’t. And the older you get you realize that you know—you at least start to accept the fact that you don’t know a lot of stuff but you’re open to learning and you’re open to things. But simple is what works best in life. The simpler things are, the more effective they can be and the more sustainable they can be.

Yeah, so obviously we’ve talked about not overeating. We’ve talked about muscle activation techniques or how to wake the body up, how to wake the muscles up and working with existing habits. So if I was to say those are three things for sustainable fat loss, is it really that easy? People are going to say, is it really that easy? Those are the three things I’m supposed to do? And I’m going to actually get results?

RF: It kind of really is, but there is one other thing and that’s consistency.

CW: Okay.

RF: You can’t be 100% switched on only 50% of the time. I’d rather you be 90% switched on 100% of the time. Again, it goes back to what a lot of people accidentally do, meaning well, but they’re perfect on their diet. No deviation Monday through Friday afternoon. And then they fall off the wagon Friday night, Saturday, Sunday and get right back on the wagon Monday and Monday through Friday and it’s the same repeating thing and they come to me and say, I’m eating really healthy I just don’t understand. It’s like, well, you are for about half of the week, but then the other half of the week you’re eating like a complete and total asshole. So if you can be consistent with that eating—so let’s do this. Let’s make your super perfect healthy days a little less perfect and make your really, really shitty days a little more perfect and even it out a little bit, more balancing in the favor of being healthy and then you know what? You’re going to be just fine. And usually they are.

So you’ve got to do this for the long-haul. It takes a lot of patience and honestly it falls right into line with the action of ghrelin. Do not chase fast fat loss. Yes, you can lose fat super fast, but it will always, always, always lead to a rebound. I don’t care about your before and after picture. I care about your two years after your after picture. So the transformation that I’m most impressed with, I don’t give a shit about your 12 week transformation, your eight week transformation, those are all great. When I was 20 I was really impressed by those. I wanted to learn how they did it. The way you do it, secret, cat’s out of the bag, super, super extreme, unsustainable diet, training, drugs. Done. There you go. That’s how it’s done.

Now I care about how to get an awesome transformation that’s sustainable that you can live your life afterwards. So one of the things I tell people is limit yourself to about 0.5% to 1% of your body weight per week in fat loss, tops. So for a 200 pound individual, we’re talking 1 to 2 pounds of fat per week. A 400 pound individual, 2 to 4 pounds of fat per week. It sounds slow, but that’s the best way to make progress without creating a ghrelin surge that’s going to leave you super hungry after your diet. So you’ve got to be patient, otherwise you’ll be in shape for a small flash of time and then you’ll be in worse shape than when you started if you try to do things too fast.

CW: Yeah, be consistent over the long-haul. And that works for everything. That works for your finances. If you took a certain percentage, 3%, 4%, whatever it is, of every dollar you earned every week over a period of years, and invested it, you’d be—everyone would have more money than they knew what to do with when they hit 50 or 60 years old. But we just don’t do it. Most people just don’t do it. But it really is that easy. Really.

I mean, it’s not a hard thing, it’s just a very hard thing to do, to follow through with. And follow-through is where people fail. So you take all this great information that you’ve shared and talked about, obviously you created a program, Fat Loss Activation.

RF: Yes.

CW: And it’s a guide. It’s a way to tame your hunger, activate your muscles and spend very little time a day doing any exercise and following this kind of 80/20 rule and achieving the body that you want as long as you’re willing to commit the time to it.

RF: Exactly. Really, I was excited about this project for a couple reasons. So first of all my background is in hardcore training. I was training high level athletes. I like to train that way myself. I primarily probably train like a hybrid between a bodybuilder, power lifter and Strongman. So that’s how I like to train. But what I found is friends, relatives, whenever they’d ask me for advice they’d look at me like I had three heads when I’d talk about squats and farmer’s walks and I realized it’s just not for everyone. A lot of people need something much simpler, something that’s more on their level.

So this program, all it requires in terms of equipment is a bench and some dumbbells. So you can do this—this is an at-home program. Again, when you talked about investing your money, a bench and some adjustable dumbbells, I’ll tell you what, that is a mild, mild investment in your physique. Truthfully, you go on like Craig’s List or Ebay or something, I bet you could get both for maybe $200, tops, shipped to your door.

CW: Think of that, the cost of one grocery bill for the week.

RF: Yeah, exactly. Or if you’re really inventive, make your own bench. Go get the raw supplies, get some stuff and make it yourself. I’ve got a buddy that makes all of his own gym equipment. So a small investment there, time investment is minimal. Fifteen minutes is the longest workout in the thing for the base workout. I have included some cardio accelerator protocols for anyone who does want to train more. But the base program that is results producing is only 15 minutes a day, five days a week.

I’m sorry. I don’t care who you are. You can—if you want to find an extra 15 minutes, delete Facebook, delete Instagram, delete Snapchat from your phone. There, I just gave you two extra hours a day.

CW: There you go. Wake up a few minutes earlier.

RF: Yeah, you’ve got to make that a priority. And I prefer to tell people to try to train early in the day if you can. We all have different lives, different schedules, but what I found is most people that put training off to the end of the day will often times find a reason to not do it or maybe it’s not them finding a reason, but maybe life just gets in the way. If it’s important to you, get up, do it, get it out of the way and then you have the rest of your day to let it flow as it may.

Yeah, I’m really excited about this program. It’s also, of all the program, nutrition plans, I’ve ever done or written, it’s probably the most simple in terms of nutrition. It’s one that really—I really try to educate the customer on how to eat intuitively and how to listen to their bodies and learn what you need as opposed to following some spreadsheet of, oh, I need to eat three ounces of tuna—I don’t even like tuna—and you eat two ounces of sweet potato—how do you get two ounces of sweet potato, blah, blah, blah.

CW: Do I weigh it? How do I…

RF: Yeah. Exactly. So it’s none of that. It’s really, in my opinion, really common sense nutrition that if you stick with it you’re consistent with it. I’ll tell you what, give yourself—this is going to sound crazy—it’s completely against what everyone else is doing in the market these days. Everyone wants to sell you on a 12-week transformation. Do this program for a year without faltering, no slip-ups, just one year. I promise you you are going to see a different person in the mirror a year from now, because a lot of people get on these 30-day challenges, one week detox, 12 week transformation and what happens year after year, they keep having the same body, or even worse body. How about we—the saying if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The current system, the current culture is broke. So let’s fix it. Let’s start thinking in terms of periods of six months to a year or a year to two years or a good amount of time to see change with reasonable methods rather than overnight rapid change.

CW: Hey, I speak from experience because we talked obviously—discussed this whole program, Fat Loss Activation, months and months ago and I implemented a lot of your strategies when I was diving through all this great literature and all this stuff that you had written and talked about. And I applied it to my own life. And in the last four or five months I have kept off 15 to 20 pounds. I’ve kept it off, maintained it and just feel great.

I can’t say—I would still say ideally I would like probably another three to five pounds off me and be able to maintain that and I think as we get closer to kind of that goal weight it can be a little bit more challenging to nip those last few pounds. But I feel great. I am not keeping myself from eating stuff that I enjoy. I’ll have a protein shake before I have a meal just to help satisfy me there. Sometimes I have a protein shake before I go to—you know, that late night craving that hits you after dinner sometime around 9:00. You know, the kids are sleep and you know, oh, my gosh. My dinner just didn’t cut it tonight, you know, so I’ll have a protein shake instead of having a cheat or having something sweet.

I’ll tell you, it just feels awesome and this is not me just shooting off a bunch of nonsense. It’s 100% applicable from everything that you’ve discussed in the program and I have maintained it and I feel great and I don’t see any reason why this is not the way I’m just going to be for the rest of time. It’s not something that you can’t maintain. That’s what whole point. That’s why diet fail, because it’s not sustainable. If we really look at ourselves and say, you know, I’m unhappy with where I am. Then you need something that is going to make you happy for the long term, not give you a month of happiness.

RF: Exactly. Well, that’s great to hear, man. I’m glad you’re implementing those principles and I always find it funny. I do eat a lot of healthy foods. I eat a lot of high quality proteins, a ton of veggies, fruits and all that, but when I’m out in a social setting, you know, I’ll eat whatever I want and it’s always funny. My friends are like, wait, you’re eating pizza? I thought you couldn’t eat pizza and look like that or like, how are you doing that? It’s like, well, it’s called getting to a point where I’m living a reasonable, sustainable lifestyle that is not overly restrictive. I still train hard, but I like to eat, too. So it’s my lifestyle. I don’t ever—the bottom line is, if you’re ever looking at your calendar going, oh, when is this diet going to end, you’ve failed. It shouldn’t be like that. If you’re looking for the end date you’ve already kind of lost the battle, because that means your battling against your willpower. The way I eat now, I could do this the rest of my life, 100%, no problems and be happy.

CW: That yo-yo effect is just so bad for you and your health, to be up, to be down, to be up, to be down. It’s really not good. And your body does not like that. It likes to maintain a particular weight and it is so easy to do with this program.

Well, thank you so much for everything and just having this conversation today just confirms everything that I’m doing and I’m a strength coach and I’m a certified sports nutritionist and yet I still picked up so much information from this and implemented it and saw results. So I mean, this can work for anybody. I promise.

RF: Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate you having me on today. I enjoyed talking with you.

CW: Yeah, it’s been wonderful. I really hope everyone can benefit from Fat Loss Activation. I know you will. You just have to dedicate yourself to it and good things will certainly happen. We’ll talk to you again real soon, Ryan.

Hey everybody, Coach Brian Klepacki here at CriticalBench.com, certified strength coach and I’m giving you the best activation exercises for the core, the glutes, the chest, the back, the brain, you name it. This is the video for you to watch.

So muscle activation and what exactly is it? It’s pretty simple. You’re activating muscles by doing certain, specific exercises for certain, specific muscle groups. So now there’s things you need to know about muscle activation.

First, you want to make sure that you do them pre-workout. So that means you’re going to do a normal, dynamic warm-up and then you’re going to intentionally warm-up the muscle groups that you’re about to train.

So for instance if you’re going to do a chest workout, you want to make sure that you’re doing chest activation exercises to properly activate the chest muscles to prepare you for the movement.

So when you’re going through these activation exercises, again, so slow and controlled. Maybe do everything two times; 10 to 15 reps. Now if you’re going for holds, five to 10 seconds per hold, really activating and concentrating on the squeezing of that muscle being used.

Now, you can also use things like resistance bands. You can use walls, you can use weights to help activate the muscles being used. Now, before we go any further, just make sure, again, you’ve got to take your time with these and I guarantee if you do these properly you’re going to do better lifts, you’re going to be stronger and you’re going to excel a lot faster than you would if you didn’t warm-up properly.

So let’s start from the head to toe. We’re going to work from the brain first and then work down to the lower body. So brain activation exercises, there’s three things that you need to know about brain activation exercises. One, they work your brain. But two, they actually help improve your fitness and also your wellness and also maybe your work or your attitude.

The top three brain activation exercises are simple. One is doing word games, Sudoku, crossword puzzles, things that will challenge your mind and challenge your thought process: card games, online games that have to do with numbers and colors and things like that. The second one is to change-up your routine, just like you would in a workout. Your body will adapt to a certain routine and plateau. The same thing will happen outside of your workout. If you go through the same motions day in and day out, your brain is not being stimulated enough to actually start improving your mental capacity. So change-up the way you go to work, change-up how you go to sleep at night, do something out of the ordinary, out of your comfort zone to really wake-up your brain and use your true potential.

The last one, the last of the brain activation exercises is intermittent fasting. Take a break from a meal, skip a meal, but be intentional about it because what happens is, one, you’re going to be hungry, but two, your brain is going to associate that with starvation and a lot of cool things will start happening within the body from the effect of that fasting period. So when you intermittent fast it could be 12 hours, it could be 16, 24 hours, you decide that and go to your level of comfort. But again, be intentional with these three exercises and your brain will start firing and you’ll be amazed at the improvements you’ll see in your mental game.

So we just covered the brain, now we’re going to go to the chest, and here are the top three chest activation exercises that you need to do to really hit those pec muscles, to fire those muscles properly when you’re doing your chest workout.

All right, so we just covered the chest. Now we’re going to work on the back. So these are the top three lat activation exercises that you need to do, again, to wake-up your lat muscles before you start work. The first one being a wall press back, the second one being an isometric straight arm resistance band pull and the last, but definitely not least, is what I call an armless superman hold. Again, these three exercises are going to wake-up those lats and prepare them for battle.

So here’s the wall press back. It doesn’t look like I’m doing anything, but what I’m doing is pushing my hands against the wall, trying to push the wall away from my body.

So we just covered the chest, we just covered the back, now we’re going to go to the midsection or your core and we’re also going to be activating your TVA, your obliques, your rectus abdominis, everything in the midsection, you’re going to be activating through these three moves.

The first exercise might be a yoga move, but whatever you want to call it, it’s a cat/cow stretch. I love this exercise because it really opens up your core, your diaphragm and also your spine. The second one being bird/dog. So this is going to be on all fours, quadruped position. And the last, but not least, core activation exercise is a hollow rock. These are the three exercises that you need to do to wake up the core and also wake up all the surrounding muscles within that core.

So now let’s move away from the core and the midsection. We’re going to go into the hips and the glutes area. These are the top five exercises, because they’re kind of intertwined, so we’re going to throw in a couple extra for you, the top five hip and glute activation exercises.

The first one, the first exercise you’re going to be using a resistance band. We’re going to be doing some band walks. That’s going to be your first exercise. The second exercise is a glute bridge using a foam roller and we actually squeeze in, applying inward pressure on that foam roller. The third exercise is a glute bridge to a knee pull. So number four is going to be your donkey kick and coming in fifth is your clam shell going back to using this resistance band. So there we have it. These are the five hip and glute activation exercises. So here they are.

So there you go. You just get warmed up and activated your glutes and hips and now we’re going to be going and talking about the VMO. So the VMO is one of those muscles that’s not normally woken-up through a normal dynamic movement. This is a very important muscle that you have to use properly in order to get the most out of your lower body work. So if you’re not familiar with what the VMO is, it’s the vastus medialis oblique. So this is on the—think of your quad or your thigh, it’s on the inside of your leg, closest to the knee. So if you look down it’s kind of like that teardrop shape in that lower quadricep. This is a muscle, like I said, that’s very inhibited. It’s very restricted because it’s not activated or used a lot throughout the day.

So I have two exercises to show you on how to properly activate your VMO. So the first exercise to activate your VMO is the single leg star reach or star drill. The second one is a band activated squat. So again, these two exercises are great to activate your VMO.

So I know that was a whole bunch of information on muscle activation, on how to warm-up and activate muscles ready for movement. So the main thing is you’ve got to activate your muscles if you really care about improving your performance. Also, it helps reduced the change of injury.

Like us, share us. Also leave us some feedback. Maybe you have a question about something we discussed, or if you have a suggestion for an upcoming video we’d love to hear about it. Also, subscribe to our channel, check out our other videos and also keep watching us, because we have—we punch-out videos almost daily. Thanks for watching; see you soon. Have a good day.

I’m in the business of giving people the tools and motivation to reach their goals and improve their lives.

Now that may sound like a very ambitious statement but it’s exactly what gets me fired up every morning to come to work!

One of the most fun and exciting areas of my business is our video creation. My publishing company CriticalBench.com has made a ton of YouTube videos (literally a ton… over 2,000!) in the past decade. These videos have allowed me and my team to build a stronger relationship and connection with not only the viewers and customers but also our fitness colleagues all over the globe.

And with all of this great video content we are helping people live their legacy of strength by empowering them to take control of their overall health; physical, mental and spiritual. That all by itself feels amazing and rewarding.

But I can also use the videos to better gauge what KIND of help people are searching for and that information is super valuable to me. The reason it’s so valuable is because we can create programs and courses that go far beyond a 5-minute video and really begin to affect change in people’s lives.

A short time ago we had a series of videos all about muscle activation exercises and the videos got a lot of views. Enough views that I realized we should go deeper into the topic of muscle activation and the many benefits it has like improved performance and fat loss. So, I quickly got to work.

Ryan Faehnle has spent years training, coaching and mentoring athletes in 21 different sports at the high school, collegiate and professional levels. He is the industry leader in creating fat loss, performance and muscle building programs for high level athletes.

Having worked with the Poliquin Group under the tutelage of legendary Olympic strength coach Charles Poliquin, Ryan has the experience, education and drive I was looking for to bring this complex information to the masses.

When Ryan and I began exchanging ideas about our new Fat Loss Activation program, I knew we were on to something groundbreaking that was going to help thousands of people achieve remarkable results.

Even though I was aware of his extensive background in sports performance, nutrition and fat loss, I was still blown away by his grasp and understanding in the areas of hunger, muscle activation and fat burning.

To look at Ryan, you would assume that his perfectly sculpted physique came easily to him (he looks like a Spartan warrior from the 300 movies!) but nothing could be further from the truth.

Like many of us (myself included) he too struggled with an out of control appetite, a love for food and trouble maintaining his weight for years!

After years of fighting the fat loss and hunger battle, he won. He discovered the impact the “hidden” hunger hormone has in our lives and that’s why he’s also known as “The Ghrelin Guy.”

I’ve been so fortunate to be exposed to and work alongside some of the most brilliant minds in the fitness and health industry over the last two decades and Ryan sits atop my list of extraordinary coaches.

In order to unlock your BEST body, you must first be handed the combination. Much like opening any padlock, if you don’t enter the exact numbers in the correct order, you will never open that lock and you will become instantly frustrated and dejected.

Unlocking your ‘ideal physique’ works much the same way. It’s not as simple as just eating better and exercising more. Sure, those two criteria are major components to attaining a better body but there’s more to it, let me explain.

I’ve taught people how to improve their bodies in gyms all over the world. From Australia to London to Canada to the United States and more, I’ve been in a LOT of gyms.

And while each country I’ve been to has its own very unique gym-culture, there is one awful theme that runs worldwide: people do not know how to work the muscles they are trying to use while they’re exercising!

This may not seem like much of an issue as long as they are sweaty and out of breath, right?

If you aren’t activating the correct muscles, then you aren’t building the body that you want, PERIOD. And unfortunately, most people tirelessly working out to reduce body fat and build muscle are making the same mistakes over and over again.

And these mistakes lead to frustration, defeat and eventually a world filled with obesity and disease like the one we live in today. Even with all of the amazing breakthroughs in science and technology in the 21st century, we have a culture that continues to get fatter and unhealthier.

Let me share something with you missed by these discouraged individuals busting their butts for results and coming up short every time. This is actually a ‘relationship’ problem and this relationship takes place INSIDE your body.

Like a faulty wire, there isn’t a strong connection between the brain and the intended working muscle(s). This weak relationship is preventing the body from optimal fat loss results. The good news is that this mind-muscle connection can be repaired and made strong again in all people. You see, your body is in a constant state of fluctuating between lipolysis (fattyacid release from adipose (fat) cells) and lipogenesis (fatty acid storage inside your fat cells).

Research has shown that increasing blood flow to the muscles in the nearby locale of stubborn body fat can actually increase lipolysis, which means that it helps you release that body fat into your bloodstream to be burned. [1]

The problem is that 9 times out of 10, people are NOT properly activating the muscles that they are attempting to train! This means that they are NOT increasing blood flow, lipolysis, and fat burning, and they are NOT reducing the fat on their most troubled areas.

Your brain controls the degree of activation that your muscles receive by sending impulses through your nerves and directly into the muscles. Sometimes your muscles can be hampered with decreased activation potential.

There are many reasons for this, but I’ve NEVER seen anyone who could activate all of their muscles properly and in the correct sequence right from the start.

Why is this? Isn’t the human body designed to function optimally? Well, yes, it is, but we have ruined that in favor of modern conveniences. You see, while computers and televisions and driving has all made our modern life much easier, it has destroyed our ability to do physical work.

Just as an example, if you sit in a chair for longer than 20 minutes, your gluteus maximus muscles will NOT be able to activate to their full potential. This means that if you attempted to do a glute-shaping workout, you would not train the muscles properly and you would not bring localized blood flow to increase the fatty acid release from the fat cells around your hips and thighs.

The popular theory of slow & fast twitch muscle fiber training has been around for a very long time…

I would have to say from my own training experiences and many other hardcore lifters I have talked to over the years that to achieve maximum muscle strength, size and endurance, a power bodybuilder (you and me) should train both the slow and fast twitch muscle fibers.

A power bodybuilder is just a fancy description for the average gym rat. These are guys who don’t necessarily compete in powerlifting or bodybuilding but want the benefits of both. Their goal at the gym is to gain both size and strength. Look good, feel strong.

He stated, “Bodybuilders in order to achieve the tremendous musculature that they possess have to do slow movements (reps), fast movements (speed reps), light and heavy poundage and everything in-between, thereby increasing the mechanisms of the muscle structure.”

It would be best to initially stick with lifts like the squat, bench press, deadlift and overhead press since they are compound lifts. These lifts will give you an idea of your total body muscle fiber type.

But if you’d like to attempt other smaller isolation lifts like arm curls, arm extensions and the like, go for it.

QUICK TEST to Determine Muscle Fiber Type

The rep tempo is 2 seconds in the positive phase and 4 seconds in the negative phase.

If a person can do 7 reps that would constitute a 50/50 average makeup of both fast and slow twitch muscle fibers. Achieving less than 7 reps indicates that the muscle is of the fast twitch variety and more than 7 suggests that the muscle is comprised mostly of slow twitch fibers.

A great example that demonstrates the tremendous difference between fast and slow twitch muscle fiber types can be found with an old friend of mine. Years ago, this guy could barbell back squat 405 pounds for 20+ reps and without any type of specific warm-up prior. I’m telling you, he was a BEAST.

I’m not talking partial squats either (barely a 1/8th movement). He would take each and every rep down to where his glutes were 12 inches from the floor. ATG style. As well he could do 450 pounds for 15 reps!

But this is where things get strange…the thing was that he could never do more than about 530 pounds for a single effort in the squat (void of knee wraps, lifting suits etc.).

Based on the reps he was cranking out with 405 lbs. and more, you’d think he was doing 600-700 pounds for 1 or 2 reps but that was not the case.

Obviously, he had a lot more ‘slow twitch’ involvement going on than fast twitch.

His rep strength with heavier loads was better than most but his 1RM just never seemed to make sense.

The only explanation for this dramatic difference is muscle fiber type.

I too find this with myself. I have better than average strength endurance on most lifts and exercises compared to others but once I get closer to my 1RM, my strength seems to go out from underneath me much like my old buddy.

One solution I found to work very well as far as recruiting both the fast and slow twitch fibers was a combination of the following sets and reps.

Many others have used the above sets and reps scheme with very good results on one compound exercise (Barbell back squats, Flat bench presses and Barbell curls etc.) only for a select muscle group.

In the past, I’ve switched the order of sets around and began with the Fast-twitch Sets first after a brief warm up period and then finished up with the Slow-twitch Sets. Play with it yourself and see what gives you the best results!

By no means is he a household name but let me give you some insight into the legacy of the late John Carroll Grimek.

Baseball has had its Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, basketball it’s Michael Jordan and Lebron James and boxing its Mohammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

But if you had to choose the two most legendary men in the world of bodybuilding, who would you choose?

I’m not talking about just overall titles either. I’m talking about impact on the culture of the sport and how these men changed or transformed the sport just by their very presence. Without them, the sport would not be where it is today.

Arnold Schwarzenegger would of course be the overwhelming favorite for the world of bodybuilding but who comes in second place?

I can tell you it’s not Ronnie Coleman, Lee Haney, Dorian Yates or Jay Cutler. If you said Steve Reeves or Vince Gironda you’re getting much warmer.

In the muscle world, there has only been two of that colossal stature – Arnold Schwarzenegger from the mid ‘60s and beyond and – John Grimek (1910-1998) previous to that!

This New Jersey native was known as “The Monarch of Muscledom” and “The Glow.”

I’ve read old issues of Strength & Health and Muscular Development magazines articles by or about him and his Q & A columns which spanned decades. I also saw all of his old-school photos.

Back then I was a bit cynical about most of the bodybuilding champions and was sure the great JCG was over-rated. What a surprise he was to me when I finally met him! That first impression was so great that today I can recall each detail of his appearance, as if it were yesterday.

Unlike many bodybuilding champions, John’s tremendous physique looked much better in the flesh than in a photo. Judging only from photos, those who have never seen him, find flaws in his body – those who gazed on him in person found those same ‘flaws’ erased, as though by a magic brush.

My personal admiration for JCG was inspired by his versatility. His physique was one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen, but what he could DO with his body was just as amazing as its appearance. He could hold up his end in any form of lifting, at any time, though he never did practice to fine tune his lifting techniques.

In tests of power, moving a huge weight in a short movement, dead lifts, squats, supports in any position – all were easy for him. Bending iron, breaking chains, grip tests, rope climbing or wrist wrestling…. these were simple too. With unusual powers of endurance, he was also a fine hand-balancer and so flexible that he could do a contortion act.

Under the posing lights is where he dominated, he was supreme!

His on-stage achievements: Mr. America 1940-41, Mr. Universe 1948 and Mr. USA in1949. He also represented the United States in weightlifting in the 1936 Olympic games.

He was eventually inducted into the IFBB Hall of Fame in 1999.

An absolute master of muscle control and posing, his routines were flawless studies in muscular beauty, grace and rhythm. No wonder spectators were spellbound when he performed!

He was the ONLY undefeated bodybuilder in all of the iron game! Every contest he entered, he won.

It’s interesting to note that back stage at the 1948 Pro NABBA Mr. Universe (which he won of course by beating Steve Reeves) he was observed backstage casually doing barbell curls with a 190-pounds and in fairly good style! Truly a legend in his own time.

The late BOB HOFFMAN of York Barbell fame once summed up the magnitude of John C. Grimek, when he answered a question in the presence of my bodybuilding mentor Donne Hale.

A young bodybuilder had been training at Donne’s Sandy Surf hotel in Miami, Florida, where tales of JCG were regular conversation pieces in the gym (Donne had a gym on the roof top of the hotel). The young bodybuilder asked Hoffman, “Was John C. Grimek really as great as they say?” Bob Hoffman wasn’t often short of words but this time he paused a long moment, then very seriously, he said, “Son, let me put it this way, in YOUR lifetime, I’m sure you’ll never see another Grimek.” I agree. There is no doubt that the iron game was made richer by his existence.

I had no training partners nearly all of my years in the gym aside from high school and college and most of the top lifters I talk to about my ‘sub-par’ bench press performance agrees that lifting solo is the one variable that held me back the most.

Listen, if you’re ‘mentally’ holding back because you don’t have a spotter, this may be your issue too. Gaining strength on the bench press is MUCH harder without the support of a good spotter whose responsibility it is to NOT let you get buried by the weight.

All in all, I never really fretted over my performance in the bench press. I worked with moderate loads for more reps (6-8) to avoid serious injury and frankly I was very happy with my physique and overall development.

Unless we are in the forest and a tree falls on us or we are doing some work under a car and the jack fails, most of our day to day situations require use of the thigh and the back strength most exclusively. Also, the rotator cuffs are compromised somewhat when doing the bench press which is why a ton of heavy benchers have awful shoulders years down the line.

Having said that, I am aware of the value that the bench plays in sports disciplines such as Powerlifting, Football and a few other select applications.

I should also mention that in the bodybuilding communities over in Europe the bench press isn’t as big of a deal as it is here in the U.S.A. I am only sharing these comments as my personal observations and not as an excuse to not perform better in the bench press.

In fact, I have searched out every imaginable bench press program in existence as a means to “up my bench” and of course The Critical Bench Program 2.0 is at the top of my list. But one of my favorites that is much simpler is the 6 Week Power Bench Program that a bodybuilder named John Robbins used to blast his bench-pressing strength and those of others into new growth.

Workout B

Workout “C” is the third training sequence and requires you to use 75% of your critical threshold 300-pound maximum for two to three five-rep sets.

Workout C

135 (45%)/10 reps,185 (62%)/reps and 225 (75%) for 3 sets of 5 reps.

A brief overview of this program would show that on the first week you are doing workout A on Monday, workout B on Thursday, and workout C on Monday at the beginning of the second week.

Workout A is on Thursday and workout B on the following Monday of week number three and C on Thursday. Workout A begins on a Monday again in week number four, cycling through as explained above where you end with workout C on Friday of the sixth and final week of this program.

To maintain a systematic strength progression in this 3-program training approach, it is necessary that you strive to add five pounds over your previous training “barometer” one rep (workout A), or multiple rep strength building sets (workouts B and C) each and every workout if possible.

At the conclusion of the six week cycle you will accomplish approximately a 6-8% strength gain in the “barometer” sets of programs A, B, and C. From here you can test for a new maximum single effort (MSE) and after taking a one-week layoff of active rest, begin a new 6-week cycle.

Remember, a disadvantaged bench press is not an inherited trait. Consistent HARD WORK and a good spotter can overcome a poor bench press!

Pull-ups and chin-ups are a couple of the best upper body exercises for strength and muscle building. They help build and strengthen your back, biceps, forearms, shoulders, and core. They can also help restore mobility and function at your shoulders, balance out your upper body muscle development, and even improve your posture, among other benefits.

Bodybuilders swear by them for back and bicep development, and powerlifters use them to balance out their bench pressing, among other things. Most experts agree that if you do any strength training, and especially if you bench press often, you should also be doing pull-ups regularly.

Now, pull-ups and chin-ups deliver a lot of benefits, but they are really hard! And many people – even those with a lot of training experience – struggle to do even one proper rep.

So, in this article, I’ll give you five ways to do more pull-ups – whether you’re trying to get your first deadhang pull-up with proper form, or trying to break a plateau to hit 10-20 reps, or more.

If you put these ideas to use, you’ll be doing more pull-ups sooner than you think.

1. Train pull-ups as often as you can, but not too hard, and never to muscle failure.

Whether you can do zero pull-ups or more than twenty reps, the fastest way to get better at them is to practice as frequently as possible at a moderate intensity, which is why the Grease The Groove method is a perfect fit for the pull-up trainee.

Here’s how to Grease The Groove to improve your pull-ups.

• Perform a moderate intensity set of pull-ups several times per day, several days per week (having access to a pull-up bar or another place to do your reps throughout the day is a must)

• Pick a repetition amount that falls between 40-80% of your maximum reps (e.g. if you can do 10 pull-ups, do sets of 4-8 reps)

• Do at least 3-5 sets, and up to 10 or more total sets throughout the day

• Allow plenty of rest between sets (e.g. 15-60+ minutes)

• Avoid muscle failure and don’t train to exhaustion

• Train as often as you can fully recover, at least 4 and no more than 6 days per week

• Increase the number of pull-ups you complete every day you train to increase your total training volume each week (i.e. do slightly more sets and/or reps every workout)

In other words: frequent, gradually-progressive practice, at a sub-maximal intensity, and always with proper form. This is a perfect formula for rapid, short-term results. And it’s why many people are able to dramatically increase their pull-ups and chin-ups with the Grease The Groove method.

First, you’ll want to decide if you’d like to focus on pull-ups, chin-ups, or neutral-grip pull-ups. Each variation has it’s own pros and cons. Pull-ups focus more on the lats (i.e. back), while chin-ups focus more on the biceps (i.e. arms). Neutral-grip pull-ups recruit more overall musculature and are also easier on the shoulders. So, choose the one that makes the most sense or that is easiest for you to perform. And remember, that you can and should make changes for variety in the future.

Also, generally speaking, you’ll want to focus on the most advanced pull-up exercise that you can perform with good technique. So, if you can do strict, deadhang pull-ups with good technique, you should. But if you can’t, you should do the closest progression you can manage.

How to work up to your first pull-up

Train with the following exercises to help work up to standard pull-ups:

Step 1) Dead Hangs – Hold the bottom, hanging position with elbows locked and shoulders packed for time. This exercise is great for people who have trouble with the bottom range of motion (i.e. starting the pull-up).

Step 2) Flexed-Arm Hangs – Hold the top position for time with your chin over the bar and elbows in tight. This exercise is great for those who struggle to get their chin over the bar.

Step 3) Negative Pull-ups – Perform only the eccentric portion of the exercise (i.e. just lowering yourself down, under control). Negative reps are a great strategy for both building muscle and increasing reps – for beginners and advanced trainees alike.

Step 4) Assisted Pull-ups – You can perform assisted pull-ups and chin-ups by

using a resistance band to support some of your weight

using a step or bench to push off from with your feet

jumping just enough to help get your chin over the bar

having a partner help you complete your reps by pushing on your mid-back or supporting your ankles

By choosing the best pull-up exercises for your goals and conditioning level, you’ll find the “sweet spot” to maximize your results.

3. Use targeted strategies to boost results.

There are many helpful techniques to improve your results. Here are a handful of them.

Drop Sets – Do a set of pull-ups, then immediately (i.e. without resting) perform a set of assisted pull-ups, then immediately perform a set of negative pull-ups, then immediately hold a flexed arm hang, then immediately perform a deadhang.

Rest Pauses – After you’ve finished a set of pull-ups (e.g. usually your last set for the day), rest for 5-10 seconds and then perform another set. Continue until you can no longer perform any reps with proper form after resting for 10 seconds.

Isometrics – Hold a specific position in the pull-up exercise that gives you trouble for time (e.g. top, middle, or bottom position), such as with the flexed-arm hang and deadhang exercises.

Partial Reps – If you have trouble getting out of the bottom position or into the top position, do partial reps to strengthen that specific range of motion.

Multiple grips – By varying your grips on the pull-up bar, you’ll target different areas of your muscles and train them in different ways, which will result in more well-rounded strength and balanced muscle development.

4. Train with the Big 3 pull-up workouts.

If you look at almost every pull-ups workout program, you’re going to find a few different kinds of workouts that are usually included. It’s because they’re simple and they work.

So, a good basic pull-up workout program would be to do the following three workouts on non-consecutive days every week (e.g. Monday, Wednesday, Friday). There are more effective programs, of course. But a simple program like this, done with a high level of effort, can product great results.

Pull-up Workout 1 (Monday) – Pull-up Ladder Workouts

Instructions: Do one pull-up, then rest for about 10 seconds. Do two pull-ups, then rest for about 20 seconds. And continue this progression until you max out and can’t complete the next level. Then work your way back down the ladder by doing one less repetition each set.

Set 1: 80% of max reps
Set 2: 85% of max reps
Set 3: 90% of max reps
Set 4: 95% of max reps
Set 5: 100% of max reps

Pull-up Workout 3 (Friday) – Pull-ups Endurance Workout

Instructions: Select a repetition number that’s approximately half of your maximum ability. So, if you can do 10 pull-ups during a test, your number is 5 reps. Complete 10-20 sets, resting no more than 30 seconds between sets.

These three pull-up workouts are simple and brutal, and will quickly help you increase your pull-up numbers.

5. Tweak your technique to maximize strength and performance.

You’d be surprised how many people increase their pull-up strength and performance instantly by simply making changes to their technique. A small adjustment in your hand positioning, or finally learning how to recruit your lats or activate your core can increase your reps immediately.

So, make sure you’re using proper form that draws on the strength of your entire body – not just your back and bicep muscles. In other words, stop doing sloppy, mindless pull-ups.

8 Tips to Correct Common Pull-up and Chin-up Mistakes

Instant improvements are often made by correcting the following mistakes:

Wrap your thumbs around the bar on the same side as your fingers (instead of opposite your fingers)

Initiate each rep by retracting your shoulders down onto your torso (i.e. stabilizing them) and keep them packed down throughout the full range of motion

Keep your elbows in tight alongside your ribs instead of flared out to the sides

Activate your core with a strong exhale during the concentric portion of the exercise (i.e. pulling yourself up), and inhale passively as you lower back down

Squeeze your glutes and thighs hard during each rep

Lengthen your spine by lifting with the crown of your head (i.e. instead of reaching with your chin) and tucking your tailbone slightly

Here’s a video that will walk you through the finer details of optimal pull-up technique. Even if you’re been doing pull-ups for a long time, I think you’ll learn some new things from this video. Once you’ve gotten your form honed in, pull-ups get a lot easier.

There’s no secret to getting better at pull-ups.

You’ve just have to train smart and put in the work. If you’re consistent, you should start seeing results within 1-2 weeks. And many people are amazed at how much they can boost their reps after just a month of focused training.

So, if YOU would like to dominate the pull-up bar, put some of these ideas into action today, and get started on a good program ASAP.

The first area in which we need to look into is exercise.

Exercise is widely regarded as one of the most valuable components of behavior that can influence weight loss or gain and therefore help in the prevention and management of weight related diseases.

Subsequently, long-term studies show a clear dose-related effect of exercise on body weight. However, there is a suspicion, particularly fueled by media reports, that exercise serves to increase hunger and drive up food intake thereby quashing the energy expended through activity.

Not everyone performing regular exercise will lose weight and several studies have demonstrated a huge individual irregularity in the response to exercise regimes. Is this a genetics thing?

First, physical activity through the expenditure of energy will influence the energy balance equation with the potential to generate an energy deficit. However, energy expenditure also influences the control of appetite and energy intake. This interaction means that the prediction of a resulting shift in energy balance, and therefore weight change, will be complicated and nearly impossible today.

In changing energy intake, exercise will impact on the mechanisms controlling appetite. It is becoming recognized that the major influences on the expression of appetite arise from fat-free mass and fat mass, resting metabolic rate, gastric adjustment to ingested food, changes in insulin, ghrelin, cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide-1 and Peptide YY, and leptin.

There is evidence that exercise will influence all of these components that, in turn, will influence the drive to eat through the modulation of physical hunger. The specific actions of exercise on each physiological component will vary in strength from person to person and with the intensity and duration of exercise concluding that individual responses to exercise and appetite suppression will be highly variable and difficult to predict [11].

Another area to turn our attention towards is the world of chemical additives and artificial ingredients.

With the increasing use of processed foods since the 19th century, food additives and artificial ingredients are more widely used today than ever before. Many countries do regulate their use to an extent but it is still a controversial topic for most.

For example, boric acid was widely used as a food preservative from the 1870s to the 1920s but was banned after World War I due to its toxicity, as demonstrated in animal and human studies. During World War II, the urgent need for cheap, available food preservatives led to it being used again, but it was finally banned in the 1950s.
Situations like this led to a general mistrust of food additives that has carried over to today, and this mistrust back then led to the conclusion that only additives that are known to be safe should be used in foods.

In the United States, this led to the adoption of the Delaney clause, an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, stating that no carcinogenic substances may be used as food additives.

Today The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) maintains a list of over 3,000 ingredients in its food additive database.

Right off the bat I know you can probably see where my next move is going to be and you are dead right. To me, 3,000 of anything is a lot.

Now 3,000 active additive ingredients that are commonly used in the food and drinks we consume everyday scares the living $h*t out of me. Excuse me for saying that but that’s the honest truth.

There’s no way you or I can know everything about all 3,000 of those chemicals but there are some players that have a stronger place in the game and here they are:

• Monosodium glutamate (MSG)

MSG triggers your pancreas to release insulin, which makes you feel hungry. Furthermore, the flavor of MSG tricks your brain into believing you’re eating a meal high in nourishing protein. When your body does not receive what it was promised, your hunger level increases. MSG has also been shown to have a negative impact on your hypothalamus, which regulates leptin, the hormone that lets you know when you’ve had enough to eat.

•Artificial sweeteners

According to an article published by Neuroscience [12], several large-scale studies have found a positive link between the use of artificial sweeteners and weight gain. One such study, conducted by the American Cancer Society, revealed that among the 78,694 women studied, 7.1% of those who used artificial sweeteners regularly gained weight compared to non-users with an initial matched weight.

• Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil

Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil is made by reacting vegetable oil with hydrogen. When this occurs, the level of polyunsaturated oils (good fat) is reduced and trans fats are created. Trans fats can be found in foods such as vegetable shortening, some margarines, crackers, candies, baked goods, cookies, snack foods, fried foods, salad dressings, and many processed foods. They are associated with heart disease, breast and colon cancer, atherosclerosis and elevated cholesterol.

• BHA and BHT

BHA and BHT block the process of oil rancidity, which occurs when oils age, are exposed to light, or have repeated exposure to air. These additives seem to affect sleep and appetite, and have been associated with liver and kidney damage, baldness, behavioral problems, cancer, fetal abnormalities, and growth retardation.

• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

GMOs are plants or animals that have had their DNA modified. In the US, the majority of the corn, soybean, cotton, and canola crops are now genetically modified, and one or more of these can be found in nearly every processed food. The problem with this is that there is no mandatory safety testing done by the FDA on GMOs, and thus there is no clear proof that these foods are safe. Testing that has been done in the past has shown GMOs can increase food toxicity, allergy susceptibility, immune suppression, resistance to antibiotics, and the incidence of cancer.

And that was only 5 of 3,000. A word of caution when choosing foods: if the list of ingredients on a package is long, there are probably a lot of chemical additives in the product. It’s best to avoid these foods, not only because of the individual effects of the additives, but also because of the unknown health effects of combinations of food additives.

Also, US Federal Regulations doesn’t require full disclosure on product labels. The only way to avoid dangerous food additives is to eat whole, naturally grown, organic food.

In summary, a large percentage of the population will simply overeat from emotions alone. Emotions are an extension of our DNA and also in a sense force us to perceive past experiences as well as current ones in a way that makes us feel comfortable and in control.

Since our emotions drive the way we make decisions and the process of how we execute those decisions, it can be safe to conclude that no matter what we try to do to circumvent the bad choices we make, nothing will work long-term. Especially if we don’t find a way to control how to manage or possibly change our emotions first.

We can give a list of 100 things to do to curb your appetite or suppress your hunger but if that individual is emotionally tied to a habit and is not comfortable in changing, those 100 things are pointless in the long run. Sure they might try one or two but there’s a good chance they will revert to their old ways.

So the million dollar question(s): is it physiological or do emotions affect us feeling hungry? Is it habits? Is the hunger real? Is it the chemicals we’re addicted to in the foods?

Your answer is yes. It’s all of the above. And yes it’s beyond complicated and way beyond everyone’s scope of knowledge with finding the exact solution to control cravings, suppress hunger and curb our appetite.

Despite our best intentions, we still make bad choices when it comes to food.

One of the primary reasons is emotional eating. Like I mentioned above, obesity is a global epidemic amongst adults, children and teens. In the world of comfort and plenty, we’ve completely lost touch with our bodies’ needs, and have instead become all too fixated to our wants.

Many of us eat for reasons other than to nourish our bodies or even to enjoy one of life’s pleasures. To understand why we overeat, it’s valuable to identify what the emotions are that lead us to mindlessly snack, overindulge, or binge. Are these feelings familiar? Do they bring up any memories or remind us of ways we felt in our past?

Do our patterns of eating remind us of ways we saw our parents use food or other substances? Or conversely, might our actions seem like a reaction to ways we saw our parents use food or beverages?

Let’s make sure we are on the same page here and this should be broadcasted to everyone everywhere: we eat so that the highly complex machinery of our bodies can continue to function and support us as we go about our day-to-day lives.

But yet we often turn to food for other reasons: to relieve loneliness or boredom or to alleviate stress or depression – (And it’s not uncommon for us to use the excuse of a happy occasion to celebrate with food and drink that’s not good for us…think about the holidays).

Once you start using food as a crutch, you initiate a cycle of emotional eating that often leads to poor health, weight gain, and eventually depression.

Emotional eating is a danger to all of us! But if you start to recognize a pattern in your behavior, like always overeating after a stressful day at work or bingeing whenever you have relationship problems, you need to find a way to address the underlying problems in a way that is not harmful to you.

Signs (emotions) of binge eating [9]:

Emotional hunger can be powerful. As a result, it’s easy to mistake it for physical hunger. But here are a few clues you can use to differentiate between physical and emotional hunger.

Emotional hunger comes on suddenly. It hits you in an instant and feels overwhelming and urgent. Physical hunger comes on more gradually. The urge to eat doesn’t feel as dire or demand instant satisfaction.

Emotional hunger often leads to mindless eating. Before you know it, you’ve eaten a whole bag of chips or a sleeve of cookies without really paying attention or fully enjoying it. When you’re eating in response to physical hunger, you’re typically more aware of what you’re doing.

Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied once you’re full. You keep wanting more and more, often eating until you’re uncomfortably stuffed. Physical hunger, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be stuffed. You feel satisfied when your stomach is full.

Emotional hunger isn’t located in the stomach. You feel your hunger as a craving you can’t get out of your head. You’re mentally focused on specific textures, tastes, and smells.

Emotional hunger often leads to regret, guilt, or shame. When you eat to satisfy physical hunger, you’re unlikely to feel guilty or ashamed because you’re simply giving your body what it needs. If you feel guilty after you eat, it’s likely because you know deep down that you’re not eating for nutritional reasons.

And the 4 most common triggers tied to emotional eating are:

1. Stress
2. Boredom
3. Social influences
4. Childhood habits

All but the 4th are environmental conditions in which we are currently placed and these triggers are much easier to change or modify than childhood habits. Think back to your childhood memories of food. Did your parents reward good behavior with ice cream, take you out for pizza when you got a good report card, or serve you sweets when you were feeling sad?

These emotionally based childhood eating habits often carry over into adulthood. Or perhaps some of your eating is driven by nostalgia—for cherishes memories of grilling burgers in the backyard with your dad, baking and eating cookies with your mom, or gathering around the table with your extended family for a home-cooked pasta dinner.

It’s not impossible to avoid these triggers but it’s not as easy as it might seem. The eating aspect of this process is the result of something or someone directing us to towards action of overeating. For instance, stress can be avoided and in return would cause the mind to not send out signals to the body saying it needs carbohydrates.

Again our emotions can make or break how we choose food and beverages. But I personally believe that our habits have a stronger pull on the decisions we make. Look at these current patterns [10]:

• About three-fourths of the US population has an eating pattern that is low in vegetables, fruits, dairy, and oils.

• Most Americans exceed the recommendations for added sugars, saturated fats, and sodium.

In the Ask Your Target Market’s latest survey, just 12% of respondents said they consider their eating habits to be very healthy. 60% consider themselves to be somewhat healthy eaters. 22% said they are not very healthy. And 6% said their eating habits are not healthy at all.

But just because many people have at least somewhat healthy eating habits doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying to improve them. Just 38% of respondents said they are satisfied with their current eating habits. 48% said they would like to eat healthier. And 15% said they are currently working toward eating healthier.

Emotions or not, how we eat is a habit and habits can be changed but the process in which it does is a different story. This circles back to our genetics and how we interpret the fight or flight response.

To take it a step further, it’s our personality that defines who we are and what we do so if we want to really break habits and change the mold we need to learn more about what drives us individually and begin to change the conversation on how we manage our nutrition.

Being a Strength Coach for the past 15 years as well as a Sports Nutritionist I strongly feel, based on my education and experience, that our personality drives our emotions and our emotions drive our habits and preferences thus resulting in the choices we make on a daily basis, like the food we eat and the beverages we drink.

I apologize for going off on a little tangent just now and I understand this isn’t a personality report so let’s circle back and talk more about tangible items that might have a more important role in the nutritional world than we realize: Appetite Control / Hunger Suppression.

Everywhere you look it seems that nearly everyone has some sort of medical condition. I’m not talking about the big issues like cancer or AIDS, more so the smaller common stuff that we hear about almost everyday. This seems to be the norm these days as unfortunate as it is.

But have you ever asked yourself why?

Think of five people that are close to you. Now of those five, I’m sure you can think of at least one ‘condition’ or ‘issue’ that they are dealing with. It could be something like a skin disorder, chronic headaches, sleep apnea, a dysfunctional thyroid and the list goes on and on.

And what about you? What are you currently dealing with?

We all have something going on and it could just be part of the natural aging process. Even though this process is inevitable, choosing healthier lifestyles can slow it down with the right techniques and certainly becoming more aware of the food and beverages we consume daily.

And this leads me into my next thought provoking questions; do you pay attention to WHY you choose the food that you do? And do you actually know what’s in the food you choose?

Out of those five people that you were told to think about earlier, ask them if they eat healthy. I think that both of us would bet that 4 out of your 5 would say, yes, they do eat healthy or at least ‘try’ to.

However, according to the Center of Disease Control (CDC) more than 80% of Americans fail to eat the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. [1]

It’s no wonder that when you read of simple stats like the one listed above, it makes sense that obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are extremely widespread right now within this country.

• 36.5% of U.S. adults are considered obese. [2]
• Number of adults with diagnosed heart disease: 27.6 million. [3]
• 29 million people in the United States have diabetes. [4]

It’s obvious that something within the system in which we live is terribly flawed.

It doesn’t take an expert to see that these statistics are driven by something of incredible power to reach these scary numbers. Nor am I just going to give you a list of risk factors associated behind these numbers or all the reasons why so many people are diseased. Instead I have chosen to investigate the emotional and perhaps the chemical reason behind why western culture eats and drinks the way it does.

Before we dive into what drives our hunger and appetite, here are 11 facts about American eating habits [5]:

1. In a 2012 study, 52% of Americans (that were polled) believed doing their taxes was easier than figuring out how to eat healthy.

2. At least 1 in 4 people eat some type of fast food every day.

3. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that in 2011 the average American consumed nearly one ton of food. That’s 1,996 pounds of food a year.

4. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s tests have found widespread pesticide contamination on popular fruits and vegetables, also known as the “dirty dozen.”

5. The study also revealed some other interesting numbers. Americans ate: 632 lbs. of dairy products (including 31.4 lbs. of cheese), 415.4 lbs. of vegetables (most popular being corn and potatoes), 273 lbs. of fruit, and 183.6 lbs. of meat and poultry.

6. According to a 2012 Food and Health Survey, only 3 in 10 Americans believe that all sources of calories play an equal role in weight gain. Many Americans believe that carbohydrates, sugars, and fats are the key sources for weight gain

7. Americans consume 31% more packaged food than fresh food.

8. Healthiness of the food we eat decreases by 1.7% for every hour that passes in the day, meaning that people generally eat healthiest at breakfast and will most likely eat unhealthier food later in the day.

9. Over 10 billion donuts are consumed in the US every year.

10. 20% of all American meals are eaten in the car.

11. Americans spend 10% of their disposable income on fast food every year.

I love talking nutrition with people. Yes, this is my profession and it’s my job to help others on their way towards better health but I also love to learn ‘why’ people are doing what they are doing.

With that said, WHY did you decide to eat what you did for your last meal?

Availability? Ease? Lack of time? Had a craving? Personal preference?

If we can replace those answers with these words instead: beneficial, loaded with nutrients, energy booster, free of hormones/chemicals, and so on… I think we would be one step closer to making BIG changes to the way we eat.

Let’s look at genetics vs. experience.

When you eat, your brain combines the signals from these specialized taste (in the mouth) and olfactory (aroma in the nose) receptors to form a flavor. Flavor is further influenced by other perceived qualities, such as the burn of chili, the cooling of mint, or the thickness of yogurt.

Humans have about 35 receptors to detect sweet, salty, bitter, sour, etc. In addition to that humans have around 400 receptors to detect aroma. The receptor proteins are produced from instructions encoded in our DNA and there is significant variation in the DNA code between individuals.

In 2004, researchers identified that olfactory receptors were located in mutational areas of the skull. These regions have higher than normal genetic variation. Any of these genetic variants may change the shape of the receptor and result in a difference in perception of taste or aroma between people [6].

Another study showed that any two individuals would have genetic differences that translate to differences in 30% to 40% of their aroma receptors. This suggests we all vary in our flavor perception for foods and that we all live in our own unique sensory world. [7]

A more recent study stated that their ‘data suggests that taste perception of fatty acid can be altered by the diet, the relative influence of genetics in this process has yet to be explored. To ascertain the role, if any, of genetic factors surrounding the perception of fatty acid taste, future studies will need to evaluate the functional consequences of allelic variation in the receptors that mediate fatty acid taste, and the relative expression of these receptors on the tongue.’ [8]

Unfortunately how things sit today we are just beginning to understand how genes alter our sense of taste and smell, and how this may affect food preferences to consume healthier foods. Further research is needed to understand how multiple genes may combine to influence sensory perception and dietary intake.

Chris Wilson: How was the 2017 Arnold Sports Festival Amazing and What Could Have Been Better? Explain why?

Ben Tatar: Here’s how the Arnold Sports Festival was AMAZING and where it could have been better. I will explain the reasons for each.

How was the 2017 Arnold ‘Amazing’?

The networking opportunities. I have been networking with the best in the fitness industry for over twenty years. That means every time I walk down the Arnold Sports Festival floor I feel a magical aura and this aura builds every single year as new history is always made! I am in a constant state of excitement the entire time I’m there and I love my connections with all of my friends from all across the globe. The Arnold (ASF) is something I look forward to all year long.

How could have the 2017 Arnold ‘Been Better’?

When I walked the Arnold Expo floor, I had one moment when I said to myself, “Why is there a two-hour line for Paige Hathaway? I met her in a Las Vegas VIP party and I could talk all I wanted with her or pick her up over my head.” Then I saw Jon Bones Jones with a three-hour line and I thought “I saw him at the hotel and had dinner with him.” When I walked around the expo, I literally thought, “I have met all of these celebrities in more personal settings without all these crowds. I have met much bigger stars than these at other events without these lines. What am I doing here?”

Another issue was that in the strongman contest one of the heavy favorites, Zydrunas Savickas got injured in training. He was Brian Shaw’s top competitor. The Arnold didn’t have the WWE experience (where all the wrestlers come) like in past years. They didn’t bring in any new big names and the Arnold didn’t have the NFL Hall of Fame this year in the convention center with NFL hall of famers.

The after parties weren’t nearly as good as they were in 2011. With adversity, though, new doors open. For example, I bonded more with friends like Angela Faith Jones, Tiny Meeker, Rob Jones, friends at the GLC 2000 Booth and other companies.

I also went to the Kids’ Expo. The Kids’ Expo was amazing because it had everything the Arnold had without the crowds. I made all types of discoveries and did great things that I wouldn’t have done if everything was great from first glance. It actually worked out well in the end!

CW: Who was the FREAKIEST dude there? Who was the biggest celebrity there (besides Arnold), and who was a huge let down?

BT: I saw the biggest celebrity names at the Makeitfit Charity Event for Autism. The celebrities at the event included Chris Andersen who won the NBA championship with that 66-13 Miami Heat team and last year’s Cleveland Cavaliers who beat the 73-9 Golden State Warriors in the NBA championship.

Six time Mr. Olympia, Phil Heath was there as were players from the NJ Jets and Pittsburgh Steelers. Some of the big name celebrities who were there were: 50 cent, Jon Bones Jones the most unstoppable UFC fighter, UFC champ Stipe Miocic, Randy Couture, the Cleveland Cavalier Cheerleaders, Columbus Blue Jacket Players, Columbus Clippers, the Ohio State Cheerleaders/Players and a few other fighters.

The freakiest dude? It’s hard to compare athletes and lifters from different sports. It’s hard to compare a 6′ 9 450lbs strongman champ like Brian Shaw to Glenn Ross, a 6’1 580lbs strongman. It’s also hard to compare a powerlifter who is 5′ 10 and 400lbs to a 5′ 9 300lbs ripped bodybuilder to the gills with 25 inch arms.

The Arnold has all of these freaks and then some. However, it’s only fair that I give a freak award out as I do every single year. When I look for a freak champ, I look for three things. These things include 1) freaky hugeness 2) their story 3) having an energy or edge about them.

This year I want to give my king of freaks award to…. Frank X Budelewski. He stands at 6’4 and weighs 370lbs. His pic next to me speaks for itself.

For the huge let down? I observed some odd interactions others had with some of the celebrities but nothing that truly qualifies as a major let down.

CW: Besides the main event (bodybuilding contest) what other attraction was the most exciting and well attended?

BT: Everyone who sees the bodybuilding sees the strongman contest at the finals since they are on the same stage. This means that all the events get the same following. During the day time, the Strongman gets the biggest following followed by the female bikini and figure type competitions. Every event has a decent following, and you have to get a seat early since over 200,000 visit the convention center during the weekend.

CW: If you could hang out with ANY 3 people at the ASF, who would they be and why?

BT: Well, if I excluded anyone from my list I would have lots of freaks and models wanting to kick my butt!!! Hahahaha.
However, I will say this:

I would like to bring the dead back! I wish I could see Mike Witmer, Sean Jones and Dean Bennett at these events again. Check out some of the articles they have done with me in past years:

I’m sure they are with me in spirit but it would be cool to hang with them like I used to.

I would like to see Critical Chris and Mike Westerdal come out for an Arnold event one day! You know, have the CB family come and enjoy the weekend together.

As I said earlier, the more I come to this event, the more I’m reminded of the great people I’ve met over the years who are no longer with us and I think of them during my time at the ASF. So many great people that are gone too soon and this is mentally with me all the time.
I was also very glad to see everyone who was there this year. I would like to give a shout out to everyone who engaged with me during Arnold Weekend. I can’t acknowledge them all, the list would be over one hundred people.

CW: Do you have any advice for people who attend the Arnold?

BT: Yes, drink responsibly and don’t waste all of your energy on athletic challenges during day one. The expo has over 1,000 booths and if you’re like me, you’re on your feet moving all day. If you’re not feeling yourself or did an athletic/strength challenge early, getting around the expo will be more challenging than competing in a Tough Mudder event. It’s best to save the competitive challenges and the heavy partying until the end.

Also, be careful with the FREE supplements and energy drinks. I took too many energy supplements back in 2005 and I was shaking like crazy the whole day. I couldn’t even take a picture because my finger was bouncing. Gladly, they don’t give these energy supplement bottles today like they once did.

When you network with someone, always know who they are before you talk to them; you will be far more credible right from the start. When you know something about someone, often they hug you right away. If you don’t, it’s harder to build rapport and engage in quality conversation. It’s better to ask for a pic and be positive. At least pics are flattering and making videos can be fun!

Lastly, people who attend these events are expecting a weekend that they can’t get anywhere else. They are going to bring their most outgoing selves. Have a blast, don’t hold back and enjoy yourself. Treat each second as special. The road and bonds can be unlimited.

CW: What new events were at the Arnold?

BT: The Arnold has events now like lacrosse, disabled powerlifting, yoga, handball, indoor Scottish highland games, Arnold pro strong woman and Arnold transformation challenges. As you can see, the Arnold has continued to grow!

The Arnold has gotten so huge that there are three stages at the Arnold. They have the Main stage, the Rogue strength stage and the Concourse stage. Although so many events are at the Convention center they have shuttle buses going to different locations.

For example, there is soccer at the Bo Jackson’s Elite Sports event. Swimming is at the New Albany High School. Disc Golf is at Walnut Hill. The indoor triathlon is at the Sawmill Athletic Club. 50+ DanceSport is at Sheraton Capitol square. Lacrosse is at the Taft Coliseum. Boxing is at the Ohio building. Table tennis is at the Voinovich Center. There is just so much and there are buses and info stations telling you where you need to be.

Personally, I think the growth is great for the mainstream. In past years, everything was at the Convention Center. Then parents didn’t want their kids to be around the booth girls or around supplements. Now kids have 200 vendors or can try every sport out at the Kids’ Expo. You have tons of non lifting events at different venues and the hardcore stuff is always at the expo with the exception of a few powerlifting events. There is greater variety of things to do.

CW: Is the ASF worth attending if you are NOT interested in bodybuilding? Explain

BT: Most of the lines are for famous people. Many people go to hang out with models, UFC fighters and pro athletes. The Arnold is so vast that they have everything. Here are some attractions during Arnold weekend:

Kids’ Expo– There is a Kids’ Expo with super heroes dressed up in costumes and athletic games/ athletic challenges going on all day. They have NFL athletes and celebrities.

70+ competitions– they have 70 competitions going on that aren’t bodybuilding related.

The Convention Center– I know non-bodybuilding fans who like sports and find plenty to do during the Arnold. The Arnold is more of a true ‘Sports Festival’ and has been since 2006. Many of the people I know who aren’t into bodybuilding are hanging with UFC fighters at the hotel and then working out with them.

So, really the Arnold has something for everyone. Next year will be the Arnold’s 30th anniversary and I will be there. I hope to see you there too!